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I used a Mac as a child (We are talking rainbow colored Apple logo) then I switched to a windows platform for compatibility reasons, then about 4-5 years ago I switched back to a Macbook. Interface is intuitive, straightforward, and very easy to learn. I will never go back to Windows, especially since Mac is making such a huge push to universal compatibility. I have no doubt Microsoft will make a comeback, or at least try, but it is definitely, slowly becoming a Mac world.

(these comments aren't directly targeted to the above person I am replying to, but also in general to those that bolster Mac computers up onto a pedestal while shrugging off the merits of the PC platform.)

First computer I used was a Mac SE/30. Grew up with both Macs and PCs.

I think Microsoft already made a comeback with Windows7. I also jumped ship after Windows Vista. Windows XP was great, but outdated at that point. Once The Win7 RC hit I was hooked. I installed it on all my computers, Mac and PC. I enjoy it more than OSX.

People don't seem to understand though that Mac isn't the universe's best computer. Apple more or less killed off one of the best composting software packages, Shake, and hasn't done a lot to advance their position as a tool for the professional. People still scream that if you want to do graphic design you have to own a Mac, but I don't see this as the case. I don't see any distinct advantage to using a Mac over a PC when it comes to graphic design... besides looking fashionable and trendy for your clients?

Besides applications like our beloved (mine at least) Photoshop, there's a lot of the tools of the trade I use that aren't available on the Mac platform, and those that are, don't run so well. Maya is a great example. Although not one of my main programs, it still gets used a bit with my clients. I was really excited when they brought it to OSX, but always found it to run rather clunky.

I get people that sit there and tell me I can use this or that program instead, but it's kind of hard to do that when my client wants files delivered in say, 3dsmax. It gets even harder when I'm working closely with a client on scenes in these windows only programs.

I like both my Mac and my PC. I often cite the hatred of mac/pc fanboys over the other platform though as a reason why there can never be world peace. Why do people get so up in arms because someone else uses a different kind of computer? Why does it matter if someone uses a PC? Why does it matter if someone uses a Mac? Why does a person's choice in a computer make them any less of a person? And why, because someone uses a PC, does that make them the person buying the economy car instead of the luxury sedan? There is such a thing as a quality PC, not all of them are made of Dell and HP's budget line of computers after all.

To those that argue that people should save up for a mac instead of buying a cheap pc... well, I guess you haven't spent much time living in poverty. Mac isn't a very accessible computer for those without much money, even in the used computer market. It's not always a wise investment. A cheap computer, properly taken care of, can last just as long. That extra money can be used on something more important... like a Bus pass, food, a car, collage fund, etc.

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True. And Apple makes Macs and HP makes HPs - let the judging begin ;)

You're selling HP short. You may not like HP, but not everything they produce is junk. HP is known for making some pretty good workstations. And unlike apple, they update their workstations more often than every two years. Also, because they are PCs, if we want to upgrade certain parts of them we're not at the whim of when apple decides to release an update.

I put some serious thought into a Mac Pro once. The whole graphics card part killed me. The only graphics card upgrade they offered was over priced and outdated. I could stick a PC graphics card in there, but then I'd lose my ability to use OSX.

HP also makes some mighty fine monitors in the professional segment too. I've worked with them a lot and love them. You can scream all you want about apple's monitors, and they are nice, but that doesn't mean HP's monitors aren't nice either.

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Macs are dead!

</sarcasm>

All empires eventually come crashing down. ;)
 
I have yet to find a Windows PC with anything close to the trackpad the MacBooks offer. I keep switching between MacBooks and Windows laptops, but prefer Windows 7 for ease of home networking ( I have 5 PCs and several wifi printers and a NAS ) and gaming. I couldn't beat the price on an HP laptop with 1080p, bluray, AMD 7690 graphics and quad core for $920 a month ago an really like it. However, I find myself using my new iPad 90% of the time unless I'm gaming or playing blurays.

I have HP, ASUS, and an old Compaq laptop at home, but nothing beats the quality of a MacBook.
 
There are too many PC companies, I think. Just like they're are too many tablet makers.

One company might release a laptop. Companies release laptops that are the same with different logos and varying prices but essentially all just ways to run Windows. Unless you're going to release something new to the market why release anything?

That's why Apple is awesome. Their computers actually make a difference. They're saying this is what we've got, take it or leave it. They haven't gone for bloatware or trial software just to try and keep their computers cheap. They put user-experience at the core of their business.

I wonder if they'll be number one one day.

I think apple make's the best windows laptop. I've always said that. I don't think you should always discredit other manufactures though. Thing is, if you don't fit into Apple's mold, you're left out in the cold.

Apple always seemed to me very much a "We'll tell you what you want, and if you don't want it, screw you" type of company. A lot of other companies might overlap some, but they also try to offer features that might seem useless to some, but others really want.

I went searching for a budget laptop once. I had tons of options and was able to narrow it done to exactly what I wanted. Apple's offerings were a good $600+ more than what I was looking at, and didn't exactly give me what I needed. I'd have had to spend even more to get that. So far the laptop has worked great for me. No problems at all.

Apple isn't exactly releasing something "new" with their laptops. Beyond the stylish outside, it's still a computer on the inside and there isn't much necessarily innovative about it. Look, I'm talking about what the core of a computer is... everything else is essentially fluff. Example? Fancy trackpads? I always pushed them aside for just a regular mouse, even on the mac laptops. It's just like the difference between people. Some are beautiful, some are average, some can lift heavy objects, some are in wheelchairs, some are white, some are black, but at the end of the day we all have the same kind of heart that keeps us alive.
 
There is a good reason that HP and Dell are at the top two spots, and it is not just that Windows is the most widely used OS. HP and Dell constitute the overwhelming majority of computers used for corporate and government IT (and general computer hardware) contracts. I know a little bit about this - I am a systems admin for the US Marine Corps (defense contractor) and all I ever see used is HP and Dell. Companies like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, etc...all use these brands as their dominant vehicle for delivery of various networking and software contracts.

Do you see apple products popping up at all in your work?
 
I have yet to find a Windows PC with anything close to the trackpad the MacBooks offer. I keep switching between MacBooks and Windows laptops, but prefer Windows 7 for ease of home networking ( I have 5 PCs and several wifi printers and a NAS ) and gaming. I couldn't beat the price on an HP laptop with 1080p, bluray, AMD 7690 graphics and quad core for $920 a month ago an really like it. However, I find myself using my new iPad 90% of the time unless I'm gaming or playing blurays.

I have HP, ASUS, and an old Compaq laptop at home, but nothing beats the quality of a MacBook.

I think it's silly when companies try to copy Apple's trackpad design; they botch it so bad. I dislike trackpads though and no matter how good Apple's is, it doesn't make me like them anymore. However, I will tip my hat to them for making one that I can sort of stand.

Love the ipad. :)
 
I like both my Mac and my PC. I often cite the hatred of mac/pc fanboys over the other platform though as a reason why there can never be world peace. Why do people get so up in arms because someone else uses a different kind of computer?

Why does it matter if someone uses a PC? Why does it matter if someone uses a Mac? Why does a person's choice in a computer make them any less of a person?

And why, because someone uses a PC, does that make them the person buying the economy car instead of the luxury sedan?

Probably because the average age of people posting to MacRumours seems to be in junior high school. More mature people don't react the same when they see "Samsung" or "Google" or "Android" in a story.

You should post more - you'll lose the "newbie" label and raise the level of discourse.


There is such a thing as a quality PC, not all of them are made of Dell and HP's budget line of computers after all.

Very true. Most here, however, only see the Windows laptops on the bargain bin at Best Buy. My Dell Latitudes and IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads have been great (and I've bought about a hundred of them). The only black mark has been a few years ago when some of them had the Nvidia mobile GPU with the solder problem - but Apples failed due to the same supplier problem.
 
HP sells to consumers AND businesses....

so yea, that's how HP sell machines, like DELL.

Apple is consumer focused, despite recent reports, Apple non consumers sales are pretty low.

Apple doesn't understand the corporate world, according to Apple, businesses love secrecy ( especially when it comes to software )
 
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Probably because the average age of people posting to MacRumours seems to be in junior high school. More mature people don't react the same when they see "Samsung" or "Google" or "Android" in a story.

Seems true on my favorite non-apple tech blog too. I love reading the same story on both and seeing how the different communities react. It makes me smile when I get to the comments that bring a little more rational thinking into the argument.

You should post more - you'll lose the "newbie" label and raise the level of discourse.

Haha, I do hang around this site enough, I probably should comment more. I read through a lot of these threads.

Very true. Most here, however, only see the Windows laptops on the bargain bin at Best Buy. My Dell Latitudes and IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads have been great (and I've bought about a hundred of them). The only black mark has been a few years ago when some of them had the Nvidia mobile GPU with the solder problem - but Apples failed due to the same supplier problem.

My current laptop is a Lenovo. I use to have a 17inch Macbook Pro. Great laptop, but more laptop than I needed. When I got an ipad it pretty much left my macbook collecting dust. I sold it to a kid just getting into college so at least it found a good home.
 
~snip~

Apple doesn't understand the corporate world, according to Apple, businesses love secrecy ( especially when it comes to software )

They aren't very good with the professional market either. I think they've goofed big a few times. It seems like their focus has been more towards consumers. That's fine and all. As a consumer device it's great. If they truly wanted to knock PC of it's high horse though, they need to be a little more open to the professional and corporate worlds and a little more tentative. Apple doesn't seem to like being told what to do though, so for that reason I think they'll suffer some.

I wonder what they do for their own data centers and networks. It seems silly to think of a warehouse full of outdated Mac Pros crunching numbers. They aren't terribly space efficient after all.

This thought seeps into the mobile world too, with phones and tablets. I love my iphone and my ipad, but because of how restrictive their ecosystem is, it blocks out potential uses. I came across this first hand during the development of an application. A company can't exactly have an internally developed application that they install on their devices only. I guess they can get a developers license and sign up their devices? But then they're paying yearly fees to do that. It's a bit of a cumbersome approach.

My application wasn't so special. It was frustrating though that if I wanted to use my program on my device I'd have to jailbreak it our pay Apple's developer fees. I'm not one for jailbreaking though so I defected to another platform. The story is a little more complicated than that though. If I could find a iOS developer to team up with, I wouldn't have minded bringing it to the App Store, but on my own, it was only destine for personal use.

I built the application up on windows and had a windows tablet. It worked perfect. I loved it, and loved Microsoft's developer tools. I looked into Android too, but because of the different screen sizes and the way they build their interface up, it made it the worse platform for my particular project.
 
i've got the HP Envy 14.. i'm really considering getting a 15 inch macbook pro? or should i wait for the 15 inch macbook air?

Which mac should i buy?:confused:, i wouldn't buy one until like this fall or something, though.

Btw... a question to the mac users.. i've never used a Mac OS before and it looks hard to learn just by looking at it. Do you guys think it's easy to learn? i know iOS is.

I started out with an iphone then eventually picked up an ipad then bought the most recent macbook air. After using osx w/ the ssd for a while I have a hard time using windows machines. Everything just feels "smoother"... -programs open up faster, 2 finger scrolling while web browsing is really smooth and responsive - even using bootcamp on the mac air it feels a little choppy (in windows).

I'd wait for the new macbook.
 
Based on these number and soon 2nd quarter financials I can bet my house the stock will tumble for a while. May be temporary but Stock will drop. Prepare or take profits now unless your in for the long haul. Will take a few months to recover.

Nonsense. These days iOS devices are where a lion share of Apple's profits are coming from, and Apple is only now entering the Chinese market full steam ahead. I don't think that the kind of growth in stock price we have seen in the past few months can be sustained much longer, but I predict Apple will easily top $700 by the end of this year, though there may be periods where the price will be stagnant for weeks at a time, or even take a bit of a dive. I doubt we'll see it go below $550 on it's way to $700.

Disclaimer: I own several hundred shares of AAPL, so take my comments FWTAW :)
 
It could also be that Apple virtually stopped marketing Macs (Mac vs PC) and that the OS it was lambasting (Vista) has been replaced with an OS (Windows 7) that even Mac users will admit rivals Lion in terms of performance. Also those commercials emphasized iLife as a core Mac attraction, whereas iLife seems to be less and less important (and in my opinion iPhoto and iMovie have gone backward in quality and intuitiveness).
 
These MAC vs PC fights are just getting hard to watch. It's literally the same argument recycled every time.

"Why do you like mac so much when it's so much more expensive for inferior specs?"

"because of this this and this"

"those are stupid reasons"

You know how quickly these would end if instead of complicating a simple situation, someone just answered simply "because i like it and i'm willing to pay for it"? What's so complicated about that? You might not like it. I do. Asking someone to specifically quantify WHY you like something and having to prove why it's a good choice is just an excuse to fight about nothing and stroke yourself off about how you're apparently "so much better at making purchasing choices than the other person".

I'm a new mac user and just recently some guy wanted to instigate a fight. For no reason other than i have a mac and for some reason, people aren't just okay with others liking sh**. They have to debate this crap into the ground. My conversation went something like:

Him: Why do you pay for such overpriced crap?
Me: because i like it
Him: Thats not a reason. Explain it
Me: Explain to me why you like your girlfriend. Why do you like the car you drive? Is it more expensive than others? Are there cheaper? What kind of toilet paper do you use? Why do you like the last movie you liked? What? I don't understand. Thats a stupid movie with no plot. Why do you like it? Explain it to meeee! I like my mac because i like my mac. I don't need to quantify every little detail for you when the overall experience is what i paid for. The only downside of having a mac are asshats like you that come out of the woodwork looking to start fights over petty crap like personal preference
 
As a long time system adminstrator before I got into visual FX (Mac, Windows, and UNIX/Linux) I have touched it all. I do have to say from a graphics perspective you are wrong though.

Shake was dying and needed a full re-write to be competitve. It was at the top of the gammut when Apple killed it and they were toying around with replacing it, but Shake was always a loss product for them. They never made any money off of it. I know a lot of the people from the Santa Monica Pro Apps group, I almost even worked for them. The whole team under Ron Brinkman went to go work for The Foundry to revamp Nuke from a Digital Domain in-house tool that was very hard to sell, DD Software had been failing for years with it, into Nuke 5 which looked and worked anough like Shake that everyone went to it. Nuke had/has a MUCH better color pipeline than Shake ever did and infinitely better 3D compositing support. Plus it is just way faster. Apple still sells Shake, as a studio you can license the source code from them if you so desire. A lot of good optical flow Shake tools (actually taken from Chalice) found their way into Final Cut Pro and Motion. Roto is better in Motion, Shake was terrible for roto. Motion is much faster and has better 3D than Motion. If Motion was node based instead of layers I might actually try it out on a feature for fun.

Maya runs fine on Macs, we are on 2012. It used to be flaky years ago when it first came out but now it is just as good as the Windows version. Also you can deliver FBX to your client Max, Softimage, and Maya (we use all three). Autodesk makes them all and it is pretty easy to move data between them. Photoshop is the same on both, really any of the Adobe products. Once you are in the app it makes no difference what platform you are on, although for professional printing I still prefer Macs.

Windows is not as much competition for visual FX as Linux is. Nuke runs best on Linux, followed by OS X, and actually kind of sucks under Windows. A lot of The Foundry's tools run best under Linux. Maya is pretty much the same too. We have been testing Mountain Lion (fixes a lot of crap from Lion) and Windows 8 (horrible horrible horrible). MS finally started to get their act together with Windows 7 and 8 screws it all up.

As far as Graphics cards you can get a Quadro 4000 card so you can runs sims very quickly and Viewport 2.0 in Maya, but honestly the much cheaper ATI cards work just fine since Apple actually writes the drivers and OpenGL support, there is no having to tweak card settings for various applications.

Why we are all Mac at our studio is the pipeline is way more stable than when we were Windows and Linux, the Macs can run OSX, Linux, and Windows on one box natively, and most of the artists prefer working on Macs, even if they come from Windows or Linux houses. We actually save significant money being all Mac based.

We have used HP Z series workstations and they would be the only other system, well maybe Boxx, that I would consider if Apple killed the Mac Pro, but they would be a much less flexible replacement, and having to run Windows 8 in the future would be too painful so we would go all Linux based, except for Solidworks and Rhino. It has been proven over and over again Macs have lower TCO than Wintel boxes and way lower than Linux boxes.

(these comments aren't directly targeted to the above person I am replying to, but also in general to those that bolster Mac computers up onto a pedestal while shrugging off the merits of the PC platform.)

First computer I used was a Mac SE/30. Grew up with both Macs and PCs.

I think Microsoft already made a comeback with Windows7. I also jumped ship after Windows Vista. Windows XP was great, but outdated at that point. Once The Win7 RC hit I was hooked. I installed it on all my computers, Mac and PC. I enjoy it more than OSX.

People don't seem to understand though that Mac isn't the universe's best computer. Apple more or less killed off one of the best composting software packages, Shake, and hasn't done a lot to advance their position as a tool for the professional. People still scream that if you want to do graphic design you have to own a Mac, but I don't see this as the case. I don't see any distinct advantage to using a Mac over a PC when it comes to graphic design... besides looking fashionable and trendy for your clients?

Besides applications like our beloved (mine at least) Photoshop, there's a lot of the tools of the trade I use that aren't available on the Mac platform, and those that are, don't run so well. Maya is a great example. Although not one of my main programs, it still gets used a bit with my clients. I was really excited when they brought it to OSX, but always found it to run rather clunky.

I get people that sit there and tell me I can use this or that program instead, but it's kind of hard to do that when my client wants files delivered in say, 3dsmax. It gets even harder when I'm working closely with a client on scenes in these windows only programs.

I like both my Mac and my PC. I often cite the hatred of mac/pc fanboys over the other platform though as a reason why there can never be world peace. Why do people get so up in arms because someone else uses a different kind of computer? Why does it matter if someone uses a PC? Why does it matter if someone uses a Mac? Why does a person's choice in a computer make them any less of a person? And why, because someone uses a PC, does that make them the person buying the economy car instead of the luxury sedan? There is such a thing as a quality PC, not all of them are made of Dell and HP's budget line of computers after all.

To those that argue that people should save up for a mac instead of buying a cheap pc... well, I guess you haven't spent much time living in poverty. Mac isn't a very accessible computer for those without much money, even in the used computer market. It's not always a wise investment. A cheap computer, properly taken care of, can last just as long. That extra money can be used on something more important... like a Bus pass, food, a car, collage fund, etc.

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You're selling HP short. You may not like HP, but not everything they produce is junk. HP is known for making some pretty good workstations. And unlike apple, they update their workstations more often than every two years. Also, because they are PCs, if we want to upgrade certain parts of them we're not at the whim of when apple decides to release an update.

I put some serious thought into a Mac Pro once. The whole graphics card part killed me. The only graphics card upgrade they offered was over priced and outdated. I could stick a PC graphics card in there, but then I'd lose my ability to use OSX.

HP also makes some mighty fine monitors in the professional segment too. I've worked with them a lot and love them. You can scream all you want about apple's monitors, and they are nice, but that doesn't mean HP's monitors aren't nice either.

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All empires eventually come crashing down. ;)
 
Someone PLEASE give Gartner a copy of Keynote. I'm tired of seeing the same fugly table.

Also, who are these people who purchase HP? It took just one phone call to their customer service center in India for me to realize just how awful they are. :(

HP is probably bought a lot by business, including small ones..
 
The last desktop I owned from hp turned into a lemon that was in the repair shop on average every 4 months.

Their color laser printers have also lost quality.
 
It's funny these people all say % market share is all important. When the fact is Apple is killing them all in the profit department. And that's the most important thing.
 
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